


Four Words

by tiltedsyllogism



Series: 221bs [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Canon-Typical Violence, Loneliness, Pining, Post-The Reichenbach Fall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-24
Updated: 2013-09-24
Packaged: 2017-12-27 13:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/979482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiltedsyllogism/pseuds/tiltedsyllogism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being far from home only gets harder, the longer it wears on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Words

**Author's Note:**

> Written for another 221B challenge at Antidiogenes. This time, we were each supposed to end with one of four words - boat, bath, border, or bound - and some dumbshit (SPOILER: this one) decided it would be interesting to try to incorporate all four words into a single piece. It probably would have been faster to write four separate ones...
> 
> Many thanks to dee-light for helping me curb my fragmentary impulses, and to thirtypercent for advising and holding my hand through the revisions.

Sherlock checks his watch.

He never needed one before, but it’s difficult to deduce the time on the basis of changes in light and air quality when one is perpetually crossing borders: a different altitude, a different time zone every few weeks. He’s been in Manila five days. If he’s honest – and honesty is grim, but indispensable – it’s harder than it was. Seventeen months stalking the shreds of Moriarty’s network has ground him down to little more than dust.

John would laugh. This dried-up shadow, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, barely able to remember the day’s details, never mind catalogue the soil types of whatever continent he happens to be standing on – John would laugh himself sick.

Another hour and he’ll be on a boat to Macau; then overland to Hanoi, if he’s right and that’s where the target he missed in Bangkok has fled to. Mycroft will know.

It’s not bottom, though: bottom was Amsterdam three months ago, when he punched the hotel bath mirror because a man in the café downstairs who wasn’t John had laughed like him. But all the blood had reminded him, how John would have wrapped his hand in a towel and squeezed. He wraps his mind in that thought, both memory and promise: it keeps him homeward bound.


End file.
